This Great Struggle (31 page)

Since the death of Stephen A. Douglas from pneumonia in 1861, McClernand had been Illinois’s most influential Democratic politician, and having him in a general’s uniform since about that time had served Lincoln’s purposes by showing that this was more than just a Republican war. It served McClernand’s purposes by giving him the opportunity to win military glory that might catapult him into the White House, as it previously had Zachary Taylor, Andrew Jackson, and George Washington. In speeches while home on leave, McClernand boasted that he was a born soldier, incapable of fear. In fact, he was a born politician, seemingly incapable of laying aside his constant angling for office even when called on to help fight the nation’s most desperate conflict. He was a better general than most politicians, though that was not saying much, and he was a better politician than almost any other general.

After serving under Grant at Fort Donelson and Shiloh and having his division routed in both fights, McClernand had manipulated the governor of Illinois into finagling orders for him to go to Washington on state business. McClernand’s real business in the national capital was lobbying Lincoln for an independent command, and he pursued that goal relentlessly, accompanying the president on visits to McClellan’s headquarters at Antietam after the battle. At last his efforts were successful, and Lincoln granted him special orders to raise an army and lead it down the Mississippi to capture Vicksburg, the Confederate stronghold that had defied Union efforts at the height of Federal success the preceding summer.

Lincoln wanted McClernand to help attract the recruits needed to meet the quotas of the midwestern states under the president’s call for “three hundred thousand more.” He was then to use his newly gained military experience to help organize and train the new regiments from his home state of Illinois and its neighbors and then, when they were ready, form them into an army and lead them down the river to Vicksburg. The president expected McClernand to worry less about the niceties of West Point form and instead take the fight aggressively to the enemy.

McClernand’s new target lay squarely within Grant’s geographic department, but Lincoln neither removed Grant nor informed him of the planned new operation. The president left Halleck, his “first-rate clerk,” to write up McClernand’s formal orders. Halleck might have been unnerved by Grant’s daring aggressiveness, but he was appalled by McClernand’s naive pretensions and shameless politicking. Halleck was a West Point man through and through, and he had also been both a businessman and a lawyer out in California before the war. The orders as he drew them up made clear that Grant would still command all personnel in his department, including McClernand; that Grant could make his headquarters wherever he chose in his department, including with McClernand; and that McClernand’s expedition could include whatever troops Grant did not believe he needed for other operations in his department. McClernand, though a lawyer by profession, neglected to read the orders very carefully. Delighted with the prospect of an independent command out from under Grant, he hurried back to Illinois, where, instead of helping to recruit and train troops, he got married and contemplated with satisfaction his future military glory.

LINCOLN’S NEW COMMANDERS LAUNCH THEIR WINTER OFFENSIVES

One thing that was clear to each of the generals to whom Lincoln had given new army commands that autumn was that the president expected action. If Lincoln had wanted the republic’s armies to settle into winter quarters for the next several months, he could have left the former generals in command. They were more than adequate for that.

Burnside moved first. Lee’s army was divided into two wings, guarding widely separated potential lines of Union advance. Burnside hoped to lunge between the two wings, cutting them off from each other and potentially from Richmond and forcing a battle in which he would hold all the advantages. When he shared his plan with Lincoln, the president said it would work if Burnside moved quickly. At first, he did. The Army of the Potomac marched on November 15 and two days later reached the Rappahannock River opposite the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Only a few hundred Confederate troops were on hand to dispute the crossing of Burnside’s 130,000 Federals. Burnside had ordered the army’s pontoons to be on hand ready for the construction of bridges across the Rappahannock, but through an administrative error, perhaps attributable to Halleck, the bulky, slow-moving pontoons were far away and would take two weeks to arrive.

Burnside’s initial idea had been good, but when a problem arose he seemed incapable of adjusting to meet the challenge. Rather than changing his plan or seeking alternate means of crossing at least enough of his troops to hold the key high ground beyond Fredericksburg until the rest of the army could join them, he simply sat down and waited for the pontoons to arrive, and while he did, Lee united the two wings of his army and had more than seventy thousand men on the high ground southwest of Fredericksburg.

Burnside contemplated the several possible crossing points in the neighborhood and decided that what would surprise Lee the most would be a crossing straight into Fredericksburg, directly confronting Lee’s strong position on a ridge called Marye’s Heights, which paralleled the river about a mile beyond the town. Lee certainly was surprised, and even as Burnside’s engineers on December 11 began laying the pontoon bridges opposite Fredericksburg, the Confederate general continued to doubt that his opponent could have blundered so spectacularly.

Lee left a single brigade of Confederate troops in the town to harass Union attempts to cross the river. As the engineers attempted to lay their pontoon bridges, Confederates hidden in the houses of Fredericksburg fired on them and drove them back from the riverbank several times. Confederate use of the town as a defensive position made it a legitimate target for the more than two hundred cannon Burnside had amassed on the high ground on his side of the river. They poured more than five thousand shells into Fredericksburg, substantially wrecking it but failing to drive out the stubborn Confederates. Finally Burnside ordered a brigade to make a cross-river assault, using the pontoons as boats, and the Federals cleared the town of Rebels in bitter house-to-house fighting. The engineers quickly laid the pontoon bridges, and the rest of Burnside’s army swarmed across the river. Once they got into the town-turned-fortress that no longer enjoyed the normal immunities of a civilian community, the Union soldiers took out their frustrations by adding a fair bit of vandalism to the damage Fredericksburg had already suffered from the shelling and close combat.

By the morning of December 13, Burnside was ready to launch his attack. He started with a diversionary assault a couple of miles down the river (which here flowed to the southeast). Here the Union attackers unwittingly struck a gap in Stonewall Jackson’s line and made some initial gains before Jackson, who had more troops available than the small force Burnside had designated to make the diversion, mounted a counterattack and drove them back.

Around 11:00 Burnside’s main effort got under way, with Union troops advancing straight out of Fredericksburg toward Marye’s Heights. The Confederate line ran along the base of the heights, where a sunken road, edged by a stone wall, offered a ready-made defensive position that the Confederates had enhanced with a shallow trench. The Rebel infantrymen could stand almost completely concealed and shoot over the stone wall, while behind and above them, along the crest of the ridge, Confederate artillery fired over their heads. The long and very gradual slope in front of them provided an excellent field of fire, while just outside the edge of town a steep-sided drainage ditch, crossable at only a couple of points, funneled the advancing Federals toward the strongest section of the Confederate line, where riflemen two or three deep awaited them behind the stone wall. The sector was so narrow that only one brigade could advance at a time.

Burnside’s grand attack thus degenerated into a series of brigade assaults one after the other, sixteen of them, right into the teeth of an impregnable defensive position. The Union infantrymen advanced bravely and were mowed down in rows until the survivors in each brigade could take no more of such mass suicide and dove to the ground seeking cover, sometimes behind the bodies of their dead comrades. Then the next brigade would advance to be butchered in turn, while the Confederates behind their stone wall suffered scarcely a handful of casualties. It was among the most one sided of the Civil War’s major battles. Inside Fredericksburg, Burnside’s dispirited troops took out their greatly enhanced frustrations in further damage to the property of the hapless but fortunately absent citizens of the town.

That evening Jackson urged Lee to attack and trap the Federals in Fredericksburg with their backs to the Rappahannock and only a few narrow pontoon bridges by which to escape. Lee demurred. He predicted that Burnside would order another day of fruitless assaults, bleeding the Army of the Potomac and further weakening it for the counterstroke he had in mind. In fact, Burnside, almost beside himself at the thought of the body-strewn slope outside of town, was contemplating putting himself at the head of his old Ninth Corps and personally leading a suicide attack the next morning. His subordinates talked him out of such a desperate move, and he sadly gave the order to begin the withdrawal to the northeastern back of the Rappahannock. The Battle of Fredericksburg cost the Federals 12,653 men killed, wounded, and missing, while Confederate losses were less than half that. Nevertheless, Lee, who still hoped in each major battle to annihilate the opposing army, was disappointed with the result.

So was Lincoln. “If there is a worse place than hell,” he wrote, “I am in it.” He had sacked the popular commander of the Army of the Potomac and replaced him with a general he hoped would act aggressively. Now that general’s aggressive action had brought an embarrassing and bloody defeat in the still-stalemated but high-profile eastern theater of the war, where foreign observers and the heavy East Coast populace could not fail to take note of it. He tried to put the best face on matters in a public proclamation about the battle, but his optimism rang hollow. Morale plummeted in the Army of the Potomac, especially after Burnside’s attempt at a January offensive ended in humiliating, if bloodless, failure when a multiday rain transformed Virginia’s dirt roads into knee-deep troughs of mud, immobilizing the soaked and shivering Army of the Potomac before it could even reach the Rappahannock crossings. Less than a week later, Lincoln sadly decided to relieve Burnside.

THE UNION’S WINTER OFFENSIVES IN THE WEST

Meanwhile, Lincoln’s new command arrangements had, as he intended, produced aggressive action on the war’s two other major fronts as well. The mere hint that offensive operations would now be welcomed rather than rebuked by Halleck had been enough to get Grant moving. Collecting together some of the forces Halleck had left scattered across West Tennessee and northern Mississippi, he formed a field army and in late November began advancing down the Mississippi Central Railroad into that state. He also directed Sherman, who had been commanding the Memphis garrison, to form a second column from the troops in and near that city and advance southeastward to rendezvous with Grant near Abbeville, Mississippi. Grant hoped that Confederate general John C. Pemberton, whom Davis had recently appointed to command the defenses of Mississippi, would challenge one force or the other and be caught in the closing Union pincers, but Pemberton fell back steadily in front of Grant, refusing to give battle.

Reluctant to continue stretching his own supply lines while pursuing the elusive Pemberton ever deeper into the interior of Mississippi and having learned, mostly through rumor, of McClernand’s new assignment, Grant changed his plan of campaign. After seeking and receiving reassurance from Halleck that he still had full command of all troops in his department, Grant ordered Sherman to go back to Memphis and there collect all the regiments of new troops coming down from the Midwest in response to Lincoln’s call the preceding summer for “three hundred thousand more.” With his new army of thirty thousand men or so, composed both of veterans and of the new levies, Sherman was to board riverboat transports and travel down the river to Vicksburg. If Washington wanted a direct campaign against the Confederate Gibraltar of the West, as Vicksburg was already being called, he would provide it, led by the competent professional Sherman rather than the scheming politician McClernand. Meanwhile, Grant would try to keep Pemberton’s main Confederate army occupied in northern Mississippi.

McClernand was still up in Illinois, delayed partially by festivities connected with his recent wedding and partially by a mistaken belief that he needed special orders from Washington in order to begin his river expedition. While he sent a string of whining dispatches to Secretary of War Stanton asking for such orders, Sherman, quite unbeknownst to McClernand, led McClernand’s intended army down the Mississippi from Memphis.

Sherman and his men were in agreement with the new Union policy of hard war. It was no use, they believed, trying to placate the Rebels by waging the war with kid gloves—or, as Lincoln put it, “with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose-water.” When Confederate snipers fired on some of Sherman’s transports from a small settlement on the Mississippi shore, he had some of his men go ashore and burn the place to the ground. From now on, the conflict would be waged with all the rigor the laws of war provided.

Sherman’s army reached its destination the day after Christmas and landed on the east bank of the Mississippi a few miles above Vicksburg. The army spent the next several days trying to advance against the Confederate fortress city. Confederate skirmishers, aided by a terrain of interlaced swamps and bayous, slowed the Federals’ progress. By December 29 they had come within sight of the main Confederate line of resistance, strongly entrenched on bluffs overlooking the meandering course of Chickasaw Bayou, a tributary of the Mississippi. The terrain was worse than Fredericksburg, with the bayou and its own numerous tributaries allowing the attackers to approach only on narrow fronts in a couple of places. Sherman ordered an assault, but it failed with a loss of 1,776 killed, wounded, and missing. Confederate losses were little more than one-tenth that many.